"... simply because for all the bitching about DRM rarely does anybody have a credible alternative that generalises (so "make money on concerts" doesn't count). "
Why is that not valid?
Because people who make movies and software can't go on tour. He was talking about more than just music.
'The iPhone, despite its many media-oriented virtues and its sweet design, will do far less than most existing smart phones.'
That's a smug way of saying "I don't get it.".
I think your reply is a smug way to avoid talking about a legitimate disadvantage of the iPhone. Yes, it's really cool, and it does its things really well - better than the current competition. But that does not change the fact that the competition does things that the iPhone does not do*. No descriptions of how good it is change that. Acknowledge that it lacks (you don't have to care about the lack, but it's there), and let's see how well it sells. I'm not predicting its downfall by any means; in fact I'm hoping it's profitable enough for a second version, maybe one that allows 3rd-party apps.
*I know it hasn't been released yet. I'm assuming it will be released as described.
What you fail to understand is that the iPhone's main feature is not "it does more." The iPhone's main feature is "it does it better." If you don't get this, you're not the target audience.
It's not a failure of understanding, it's a complaint. We can all understand perfectly well that the iPhone does it better, and many of us are impressed and excited about that. However, many people want a phone that does more. If the iPhone does 75% of what I need and does it really well, guess what? I don't buy it, because it doesn't do what I need. I am not its target market, and this is OK. It is also OK to point out that Apple is missing this market, and to question whether that is a wise decision.
In any case none of this is anything like the actual story, where people whose activities were completely legal in their country, which only took place in their country, and which they had ceased doing years ago, were travelling through the US and arrested under a law that is not even in effect yet.
It is alleged that one end of the transaction took place in the US, and I haven't heard anybody contradicting that. The activity occurred at least partly in the US, so if these people were responsible for the activity, and the activity was illegal, then where they were when the activities took place is not very important. A crime occurred in the US and they committed it. Now all these assumes that there actually was a crime committed. I have no idea if that is the case.
I sure would if they didn't commit the crime while inside of your borders, and I think most Americans would agree with me. Imagine this scenario: I'm an American collector of Nazi World War II memorabilia, which was legally obtained...[the rest of the well-stated scenario]
It's definitely a problem. But the reverse also causes a problem. If someone is mailing bombs to the US from another country, and then visits, should we let him go and hope we can extradite? If we're willing to extradite, why should we be unwilling to arrest the guy while he's here? Finally, I think the problem is not where or how someone is arrested, but the laws themselves. We don't mind if a US citizen gets arrested in France for killing people with letter bombs from the US. This is because we think the murder laws are good, and he ought to be arrested. We don't like it when someone gets arrested for selling or buying Nazi stuff in France because he did it from outside France, AND we think it's a bad law. That's my take, anyway.
But, set a hard deadline, and they end up complaining that there wasn't enough time to "polish" it; to add in every feature; to include x, y, and, z, and so on...
If you RTFA (a lot to ask I know) one of them said that for Halo everything came together perfectly in the end, and basically they had exactly the right amount of time. That is to say, I'm sure there was more they would have liked to do, but his message was more "we had the right amount of time" than "we needed more time".
"We had about four to five weeks to polish Halo at the end. No more than that. And that last five per cent is responsible for 30 per cent of the success of the game, or more. That's the period in which we really had a perfect storm. The team was all there, everything was working great, the Xbox hardware was finally there and good, and we just were able to relentlessly execute on that. The entire game came together within that four- to six-week period."
The optical scanner systems that are in use here print out a total sheet, there's no memory card.
If all it does is validate the paper, and the original ballot is what's counted, then that's a good use of technology in voting. But it sounds like you're saying the scanner is what counts the votes. If so, then it's an opportunity for fraud. If someone can gain access to the machine before the election, or gain access to someone who already has access to the machine, it can be hacked. Either something can be put inside it to change the output, or it can be entirely replaced with a machine that looks the same but has the aforementioned hack in it. Is that a major problem? Probably not. What I'm wondering is, what happens to the piece of paper it prints out? Do humans tally those up for the final result, or are they counted by other computers? If the latter, that would be the more vulnerable point in the process.
During the recount in 2000 we were the only county to have ZERO change in the final tally of the hand counted versus the machine counted ballots.
That's great that you had no changes. If computers are counting votes, and they're not correctly and randomly audited in every election against a piece of paper that the voter approved, it is "that bad". If that's the process where you are, then awesome. If not, then all it means is your election didn't happen to get hacked that time.
A recount, or an audit. Randomly select a jurisdiction and recount a statistically significant number of votes. Results vary from what the machine told you? Time for a full recount.
Statisticians are good at this kind of thing -- a 5% variance would be more than enough to get noticed. If you're going to create enough of a variance to make a significant difference in any but the closest of races, it's enough that a properly conducted audit will catch it.
Yes, that's pretty good, if it's done right. However in at least some jurisdictions, "random" means "whatever the election workers pick" and I have no idea what "statistically significant" would be translated to in such cases. I think we should be doing those audits against manual counts, and after those processes are shown to be reliable and executed properly, then start to think about computerized counting.
Optical scan does away with this if properly administered. We put our ballots directly into the scanning machine ourselves.
How do you know that it's properly administered? Have you seen "Hacking Democracy"? The testers tried to hack a test election. They set up a system with an optical scanner. The scanner reads ballots, prints a receipt, and puts the results on a memory card. The card is then taken to a computer to tally the votes from many scanners. Someone tampered with the memory card (not the scanner or the computer), they scanned ballots, the machine showed the correct count (so if you looked at the ballot and compared it to the receipt the machine printed, they matched) but the votes on the memory card were wrong. The manufacturer had said it was impossible to hack the system given access only to the memory card. Then of course they said nobody could ever get access to the memory cards anyway. I don't want to trust that nobody ever has access to the memory cards (or whatever part of the system in question is vulnerable).
If computers count the votes, then bugs or malicious programming can steal the election. Open source, you say? If you can come up with a way for a complete novice (ie election worker) to verify unambiguously that no portion of the system has been tampered with, fine. I haven't heard of any such technique.
So what... I don't think anyone out there but a few neophytes truly object to computer assisted voting. BUT it needs to be done right, and potentially needs to always be optional.
I think there are plenty of people who object to computer-assisted voting, regardless of what you mean by the term. If you mean using a computer to create their ballot, lots of older people are not so comfortable with computers and would rather use a pen. If you mean having a computer count the ballots, I am one of many computer-savvy people who oppose this. And this cannot be optional. I don't want to just choose whether my vote is counted in a secure, verifiable and open manner, I want all the votes counted that way. And it sounds like a logistical nightmare to count some votes electronically and some manually anyway. Having a computer produce a ballot - great. Having a computer count a ballot - bad.
That's why they're behind glass where the voter can look at the paper before confirming his or her vote. If I told the machine I'm voting for Bob but the piece of paper behind the glass window says Alice, I (the voter) know there's something wrong.
But it wouldn't say that. You would push Bob's button, and the paper would say Bob, but the electronic vote would go to Alice. The paper is only used in the case of a recount, so as long as the results are tweaked very slightly, not enough to trigger a recount, there's no problem. If a random 5% of ballots are audited, there's not much chance of that ballot being one of them, it's not clear that even if some ballots are found to be wrong that it would be chalked up to fraud, and there's a good chance the selection of the 5% is not really random anyway.
The banking system is not anonymous. If the bank takes money from someone, that someone can easily and quickly find out that it happened. If someone takes your vote, you have no way of knowing. It may really hit home if you live in a swing state. We know there was voter fraud with these electronic systems, so it really could have been *your vote* that was intentionally miscounted - if you live in one of those places. If we switch to a non-anonymous system, where you can log on or make a phone call to check how your voting receipt compares to how the computer says you voted, that would solve the problem. It could cause other problems of course, but I don't know which would be worse. If you simply must have computers counting votes, IMO you have to pick one of those problems. I think we shouldn't have computers counting votes (as I mentioned earlier in the thread).
I think for now there should be a concentration on creating ballots that are easily machine-readible, making the counting easier.
Machines reading the ballots are the problem, not the solution. If there is any software involved in counting the votes, then our votes are counted by something that could be buggy or programmed maliciously/dishonestly. Why have computers count the vote at all? Speed? Do we need to know who won the next day, when they won't be sworn in for two months anyway? Reliability? A flawless computer system will obviously be more reliable that a manual count, but who ever heard of one of those? Security? Please. Cost? Surely there are plenty of volunteers willing to count ballots honestly, knowing that they can be charged with a crime if they're found to be committing fraud. I would sign up if I knew it meant we didn't need computers in the process. I just don't see any good reason to have computers counting our votes.
I think we were talking about the US spending its citizen's tax dollars on healthcare....its own, and I've not heard of a malaria plague here.
Fair enough. But to suggest that the healthcare problem(s) in the US have been solved by "get an education and a good job, and you've got healthcare" is ridiculous. Totally off-topic, but ridiculous.:-)
Head restraints, crumple zones, airbags, and such are not needed for the vast majority of citizens, "Who needs them?"
Tens of thousands die every year in car crashes in the US. Who needs to be protected from shoulder-fired missiles? Still waiting for an answer on that one.
Trying to solve problems is essentially what Slashdot tries to cover on a daily basis and you would think we are not by reading some of these comments.
That's true, but the problem this tries to solve doesn't exist.
Whether we are learning to fight insurgents and gain the knowledge and experience and ability to track and identify, where we did not before, or establish systems that we improve to screen passengers, they all get improved over time (think DOS computers to now).
Yeah, but this program doesn't do any of those things.
Let's say a major airline did just that and had to charge an extra $10/ticket to make up for the cost. Now, every time somebody's shopping for tickets on Expedia, that airline looks more expensive and is avoided.
So because the public would show its preference for not paying for this system if given the choice, we should not give them a choice and instead force them to pay for it? Sometimes you have to do things like that for product safety, but it's only a good idea when the change is known to be an improvement (eg seat belts). With zero jets shot down in this way outside of combat zones, how can we be sure anything would be safer? We cannot, and I don't support spending my money just in case it might help.
This is already taken care of....get an education and a good job, and you've got healthcare.
Whew, glad to know those problems have been solved. Make sure the World Health Organization knows about that, OK? They seem to be all worked up about malaria or something.
Do we need to wait for it to happen before looking into solutions? Of course it will cost billions. But can you put a price on your [daughter|son|mother|father|loved one] who could just be sitting on that plane?
The problem is we don't have the money to defend against everything bad that could ever happen to anybody. So, we have to pick what we're going to defend against, and ideally that decision should be based on the severity of the possible incident combined with its probability. The latter is very difficult (maybe impossible) to determine with any kind of accuracy, which makes the decisions difficult. In this case, we've chosen to defend against SAMs fired at commercial aircraft, and that money will not be available for something else. I would rather see it go to some kind of disaster relief preparation that would be useful in case of various kinds of disasters (including terrorist attack), because we *know* that there will be disasters in the future, so it's less likely to be wasted money. However, it's my belief that the government generally, and possibly this administration in particular, is most interested in being seen to be doing something. This program is flashy and high-profile, so it got some bucks. Call me a cynic, but I guess among/.ers I'm starry-eyed.:-)
Or, about $1 to $2 per passenger per flight. I think a human life is worth more than that, how about you?
But that presupposes that it actually saves those lives. What we have to ask is not whether a human life is worth $2, but whether saving one from an infintesimally small chance of death is worth $2. And humans are notoriously bad at making such evaluations.
As worded the bill doesn't even require a blogger to be paid, all it requires is that there be 500 members.
It also says "The term `paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying' means any paid attempt in support of lobbying contacts on behalf of a client". IANAL, but it looks to me like you have to be reaching more than 500 people, AND get paid for getting the message out. I can't see how you could get in trouble for any type of speech nobody is paying you to make. Right now I'm thinking this is in line with requiring disclosure of money spent on political ads. I'm sure there are plenty of people opposed to those rules because they stifle free speech, but I'm not one of them.
So the idea would be to only punish bloggers and or lobbyists that are actually successful at raising money. All of the sites that are "just scraping by" wouldn't be considered lobbyists, but would instead fit inside some other category that was exempt.
It's not about the amount of money you make, it's about what you're getting paid to do. If you're getting paid for ad space or T-shirts, no problem, even if you're raking it in. If you're getting paid to encourage (more than 500) people to contact their legislators, you have to register. At least that's how it looks to me.
Slashdot Mirror
*I know it hasn't been released yet. I'm assuming it will be released as described.
"We had about four to five weeks to polish Halo at the end. No more than that. And that last five per cent is responsible for 30 per cent of the success of the game, or more. That's the period in which we really had a perfect storm. The team was all there, everything was working great, the Xbox hardware was finally there and good, and we just were able to relentlessly execute on that. The entire game came together within that four- to six-week period."
If computers count the votes, then bugs or malicious programming can steal the election. Open source, you say? If you can come up with a way for a complete novice (ie election worker) to verify unambiguously that no portion of the system has been tampered with, fine. I haven't heard of any such technique.